After I write a long rambling post, I generally go to bed and think, no one is going to read all that crap. So I write another companion piece which is in a style more agreeable to the attention span of the average Internet user. So here are 10 short, simple, and maybe even useful search engine optimization tips:

No website is an island. Don’t be afraid to link to peers even competitors. However don’t forget to repeatedly link to your own most valuable content.

Beat a dead horse. Search engines robots are getting more clever all the time, but they have a simple purpose in life, they read webpages and add them to the search engine index. So writing yet another article even just a couple paragraphs which is keyword rich will likely improve your rankings an iota eventually. You have to keep with your search engine optimization efforts for six months, a year, forever.

Also start paying attention to your referral logs or your website statistics, but don’t become obsessive. Google Analytics has more information than most people will ever need. Establish a baseline on how your website performs for your chosen keywords now, then measure your progress. Have a single, modest goal and work towards it. Whether you’re trying to sell something, increase pageviews, increase ad revenue, increase followers/fans, increase the number of pages indexed, increase incoming links, increase social media mentions, or increase Klout you have to focus. You can’t have it all, right away.

Social Media ‘Gurus’

The Onion seems to share a similar opinion to me on the actual qualifications and expertise of most social media experts.

Search Engines Adapt and SEO Best Practices Change

Timeless advice like focusing and emphasizing Quality and avoiding anything consider spam-y is alway valid. But in order to stay on top in search engines rankings especially for competitive keywords requires time and after all these years likely money. I still get most of my traffic through Google and social media, but I think this blog gets less traffic than it did a decade ago.

This isn’t an accident, a lot can happen in you life online and offline, if you want to stay on top you’ll likely need to adopt new techniques. Structured Metadata has become more important to search engine optimization. Social media or self marketing has become more important, but it isn’t “all good”. You need to remember you’re always writing for your future boss.

I still maintain old hand-coded HTML. However, most content that is published to the web uses a content management system or social media. This blog runs on WordPress and keeping your content management system up-to-date is important. So to start 2019 I upgraded to WordPress 5 and starting using Yoast’s SEO plugin. In this way lots of small details are handled so I can focus more on writing and updating old blog posts such as this one.

If you have questions or advice on search engine optimization you can leave them below.

I do not accept guest posts. It is a personal blog. I am not sure how letting random people post random stuff helps with my search engine optimization. As you yourself summarized my website niche:

Is my niche “” or is my in fact the colon? The fact you or your algorithm does not know what my website niche is or failed to articulate it in your most likely spam comment is another reason not to allow you in particular to post on my blog. The very concept of letting other people post on “your” blog seems foreign to me.

However please enlighten me, what are the top 10 reasons from a search engine optimization perspective I should allow guest posts?

Huffington Post let a lot of people post on a lot of topics, it absolutely destroyed their taxonomy, this was bad for their search engine optimization and ad revenue. So if one of the largest WordPress sites in the world had to find out the hard way that random guest posts are bad, I don’t think I need to. I knew they were a bad idea, you are giving up total creative control for what? I have no ads. What do I gain by allowing you to publish on my blog?

I wrote about the problems spammers and others have caused me while maintaining this blog, in short bulk commenting like yours in the hope that one out of what a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand bloggers is naive enough to let you post whatever you want on their blog in the hope that you’ll miraculously make them a famous blogger and dominate keywords with a single post?

People within the industry already know about all of these, but I guess there are some individuals who aren’t still familiar with SEO. Hmm, my friend is a blogger and I think this article would be helpful for her. She really wants to become famous with all her writings and all, but others think she needs more SEO! I’d be sending this to her. Thanks, this could help her a lot.

It was definitely written for people just starting out. It wasn’t addressing the ‘industry’ at all. Some people think they can blog there way to fame and fortune, or blog their way to book deal, or blog their way to a better career. None of that has happened to me and I’ve been self publishing for a long time, of course I don’t necessarily follow my own advice, but I can write a pretty good blog post or Top Ten list given all my experience.

Thanks for stopping by and hopefully the list helps some people, maybe they’ll thank me in their book. ;-)